Sustainability, lifestyle, and consumption in Asia 7lifestyle and consumption, such as weekly bathing, sharing bath water, walking
and cycling, minimal meat consumption due to cost, seasonal food access and
choice, and so on. Revisiting the work of classic social theorists such as Giddens
and Bourdieu, social practice theorists such as Shove understand the social as
being embedded in and produced through fields of embodied practices tied to
shared (though contingent) norms and conventions (Schatzki, Cetina, and Von
Savigny 2001; Shove, Trentmann, and Wilk 2009; Shove and Walker 2010). Thus,
rather than viewing the social in terms of a priori power structures, relations,
and institutions, then, practice theorists focus on the way in which practices are
collectively organized and supported through particular socio-technical regimes.
The key point here is that while Western forms of post-industrialisation have
become associated with highly carbon-intensive lifestyle practices, norms around
lifestyles can potentially shift and be collectively organized in radically different
ways. John Urry provides a stark illustration of this in his book Climate Change
and Society, wherein he imagines various post-peak oil futures, from a Mad Max
style “de-civilizing energy-starved future” to a digitized but hyper-regulated and
securitized “smart” future (Urry 2011, pp. 149–53). Discussions of development
in Asia, however, rarely imagine the possibility of radically different scenarios for
living. Instead, these debates invariably depict the rising Asian middle classes as
emerging Western-style consumers while presuming that the region is and/or will be
subsumed by a one-size-fits-all mode of capitalist modernity or “imperial” mode of
living (Brand and Wissen 2013, p. 690). For instance, Brand and Wissen argue that
The growing middle and upper classes in industrializing “emerging markets”
are adopting the lifestyles of the corresponding classes in the global North.
All together, they constitute a “transnational consumer class”
(Brand and Wissen 2013, p. 698)But is it the case that consumerism has become the default aspirational
lifestyle for all South East Asian citizens? While there is no doubt that forms
of globalizing consumer-oriented capitalism are strongly shaping the region,
with potentially dire consequences for global carbon emissions, these kinds of
statements gloss over considerable complexity on the ground in relation to both
so-called developing nations as well as “developed” parts of Asia. They also have
a self-fulfilling quality that makes it hard to imagine any space or future outside
of such processes, with critical Marxian accounts such as that offered by Brand
and Wissen in certain ways ironically reinforcing rather than offering alternatives
to “imperial” ways of thinking, being and living.
The assumption that South East Asia is now largely shaped by Western,
middle-class lifestyles and aspirations needs to be critically scrutinized. For
instance, while there has been a significant shift toward consumer-oriented modes
of citizenship in many countries, the notion of a trans-national or even a trans-
regional “middle class” is problematic given the diversity both within countries
and across the region in terms of lifestyle and consumer practices (Lewis, Martin,
and Sun 2016). While the rise of an upwardly mobile echelon across Asia has